


he's still here

by biscuits_and_tea



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Death, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, everyone is 16, i swear this wasn't a challenge for how many times i could get the word scream in, ish, it just happened that way, it's just sad poor boys, klaus is the best brother and y'all can fight me, mostly klaus and ben, welp this is just pure angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-25
Updated: 2019-04-25
Packaged: 2020-01-31 17:19:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18595879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/biscuits_and_tea/pseuds/biscuits_and_tea
Summary: Usually, it takes some effort for Klaus to summon a particular spirit.Not this time.OR: the day the Umbrella Academy fell apart for good





	he's still here

He’s awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of his brother screaming his head off.

Screams are not an unusual sound to reverberate in Klaus’s head or even around the house for that matter, and Ben’s screams are some he can easily identify after a shared brutal childhood, both boys terrified of power they never asked for and can barely control. He’s even heard them in his dreams before, where the dead rise again to snatch his siblings away one after the other.

These screams are not in his head though. Ben is stood at the foot of his bed, yelling like the sky is falling in. He sits bolt upright.

“Christ, Ben, you nearly gave me a fucking heart attack! Keep it down, will you? Dad’s going to go ballistic if he-“  
A splintering chill crawls up Klaus’s spine then.  
“Dad’s gone out. You’re not supposed to be here. You’re supposed to be in Paris. With Dad and Luther. You’re not supposed to…”

He reaches out a hand to touch his brother. It phases through.

It’s Klaus’s turn to scream at the top of his lungs, and he does.

***

Grace tried to make him hot chocolate since they’re all sat in the kitchen, but he’s sixteen and not a child and he takes his whiskey neat from Reginald’s liquor cabinet, clamping his hands over his ears between sips. Diego and Allison accept Grace’s mugs, rubbing sleep from bleary eyes. The whole house is awake now and demanding answers and everything is horribly loud and bright.

“K-Klaus, you need to calm down.” Diego’s attempt to be firm falls on deaf ears. He looks to Allison with a shrug. “I know Dad told you that messing around with feelings was dangerous, but…”

“Klaus, I heard a rumour that you’re very calm,” she tries as gently as possible, almost tacking on _and you put the alcohol away_ but deciding not to push things. The change is not instantaneous, but their brother’s breathing gets slowly under control.

“What happened?” Diego presses. “Because I’m tired and it’s 3AM and if this is you being an over dramatic piece of shit then-“

“Ben’s dead.” His tone is flat, placid. Ben in spirit is sat under the table, choking on sobs and trying to make himself as small as possible, but Klaus isn’t bothered anymore. “And I feel fine now. Thanks Allison, really. You should bottle this stuff.”

“D-dead?!”  
“How?”  
“Are you m-m-ma-making this up?”  
“Don’t joke about this, Klaus,” Allison finally says, her voice cracking.

“Why would I joke about it? I can see dead people, and right now I can see our Number Six. And he’s losing his shit. So maybe, I shouldn’t be calm. Not that I have a choice.”

They don’t want to believe it until they see it, and this should be the final straw. This should make him furious: if they don’t believe him about this, they won’t believe him about anything. But Allison’s numbed him in a way he hasn’t managed through all his small forays into self medication thus far. He slides under the table beside his shaking brother instead, because this state of mind not crowded out by fear is a rare one, and he’ll use it. “Hey, it’s okay, you’re safe. You’re here. You’re home.”

“There were so many of them… and they hurt me… they hurt me so badly and I, and I screamed and screamed but… Luther didn’t come soon enough… Father made a call… and I’m…”

“You’re okay. It’s okay. You only die once. You’re still here, all right?”

“This is wh-what I did to people, Klaus! This is what I did to people when _I tore them into pieces_!”

“Sshhhh, shshshsshshh. Shush. It’s okay. You did what you were brought up to do. It’s not your fault.”

His other two siblings are thrown into panic, trying to contact their father, Allison twisting the tablecloth with her fingers, hot chocolates forgotten.

“What’s he saying?”

“They were outnumbered. Father and Luther made a choice. Ben paid for it.”

“I don’t believe you!” Allison snaps. “Luther would never leave one of us behind. Never.”

Diego’s hands are curled fists. “I’d wait until he gets back before you can ask him for sure.”

“Klaus, you won’t leave me, right? Please don’t leave me, I’m so scared, I’m so...”

“Never.” Klaus promises with far more certainty in his voice than Allison’s, ignoring his siblings as they argue and fret and wait for the others to return to the house. “You sure you want to stick with me?”

Ben ignores this. “He’s going to be so _angry_ , I don’t know what to do…”

“He can’t be angry with you now. He can never hurt you again, okay?”

Ben seems unconvinced, as if their father could reach into the afterlife just to punish him, but his panic is finally subsiding. “Okay.”

“If he tries to hurt us, we’ll go. We’ll run away and we’ll be all right.”

“You’ve said that before.” When they were eight, eleven, thirteen. Whispered in the middle of the night. After Klaus’s third time in the mausoleum. After Ben’s monsters nearly tore the house apart and he limped out of Dad’s study mottled in bruises. Both playing along until Klaus grew out of building castles in the air with words, describing the future they were going to have, and tried instead to forget the future was ever going to matter.

“I mean it this time.” Klaus yawns, the alcohol and his sister’s words making his eyes grow heavy. He barely notices Grace drape a heavy blanket over his shoulders as he falls into an unusually dreamless sleep, still under the table. Ben is quiet too, waiting for the sun to rise, watching them bury his own broken body in the garden at a funeral where Klaus is still too calm to cry.

“Did you let little Ben die?”

“Don’t make me tell you this, Allison.”

“I will if you don’t talk to me straight! Tell me the truth right now, Luther!”

“You weren’t there! You don’t know what it was like!”

And so the last of the Umbrella Academy fractures at its seams, marches out the front doors with three suitcases in tow to their father’s indignation, or out the window in the middle of the night with vigilante mask in hand, or overdosing their way into hospital and never properly discharging back home.

“I’m sorry you got stuck with the shitty brother,” Klaus mutters sometimes when depression grips between the bouts of perfect numbness that are growing harder to find the more they’re chased.

Ben swings from bitter - “yes, I love watching you waste the life I can’t lead” - to sympathetic - “it’s tough, man” - to reassuring - “I wouldn’t want to be stuck with anyone else”, all three things simultaneously true and forgotten by morning.

But at least he’s still there.


End file.
